


reach to its rest, and fall

by gogollescent



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-20
Updated: 2013-04-20
Packaged: 2017-12-08 23:39:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/767434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the prompt, "Ziyal, five loves."</p>
            </blockquote>





	reach to its rest, and fall

1\. She was born on Bajor, but most of her childhood was spent in interregnum, and she had only rarely set foot outside the Tora family complex before she and her mother were moved to Terok Nor. The Resistance was too far-reaching and her resemblance to her father grew stronger every day. She would lean on the railing of the Promenade and dream of cities not enforced into existence by a surrounding void, when she was twelve; she had been looking forward to Lissepia, and a world less curtailed, markets and friends. She sometimes thought she’d doomed the  _Ravinok_  by lacking a sense of dramatic irony. What it all amounted to was that at the end of her time in the prison camp she was eighteen and as new to the intricacy of planets as farmer’s children a third her age. Her father was pitystruck; the first thing he did, after alienating his remaining family, was take her to Cardassia’s capital. 

It ruined her life, in a way. It was too much to learn that she had lost: that glittering, anxious subsphere of a world she had no leverage on. Dukat got her souvenirs and she dragged him to the opera, to the stone-vaulted libraries with their baffling hierarchies of security and invitation, to the parks that had just endured autumn and which she overran like a second cold snap. Little spiced-cuisine restaurants that occupied cellars once used for the torture of enemies of the state. Her father preferred those fragments of culture that could be brought to him in tribute, and he regaled her with stories about his days as prefect of Bajor, when famous singers sweated through his office’s carpet until he told them to hit a high note. Ziyal, though, was entranced by immobility: by the power and condescension of native Cardassians, artists and civilians alike, who looked at her when at all out of contemplative distaste, and might have risen like stalagmites from rock. Sometimes she watched the crowds in the streets and felt as though she were experiencing a deliberate pattern, ink dropped on her face through a silk screen—beauty composed of a thousand banal gestures, the repeated shape of a turned head and a long vertebral ridge, spreading outwards from the center of her.

 

2\.  In the Breen camp she spoke to no one. Her duties were mostly to do with the upkeep and occasional excavation of the wells, and that was why, when her father came, he discovered her sitting beside a shallow rectangular fountain whose construction she had organized herself. She had a gift for design, not only on the page but in space and stone. Not that it mattered to him what she had spent her forced labor on: he had come to take her away, by death or shuttle, and she wasn’t sorry. But before he came she dug and thought of his body, dreamed of unearthing him suddenly in the dark—how the earth would fall away first from his forehead, and then from his shut eyes, his long fossil’s throat. It seemed to her natural that he would have been waiting for her all along, at the heart of the nameless world, like an underground spring in which she could see her own face. He was her father and if only she found him soon enough he would be her quenching source.

It worked out. He found her, and they went back to Cardassia Prime, and he talked like he was happier than he had been when she was a girl and he powerful. He booked a suite on the highest floor of a hotel whose owners called him by his first name, and together they sat on the balcony and talked about the future. She was eager to live. “The pearl of the empire,” he said, meaning her or the city, but mainly he was content to survey the tiered and braided thoroughfares from behind the railing, while she stood and imagined Cardassian space, so dark and deep, enfolding the skyline like an oyster’s craggy shell. She gripped the balustrade with all the effort she had once devoted to drawing water from kilometers-deep holes—a strength now made ornamental, just sufficient to whiten her knuckles and make the wrist’s ropes show. Her father was an older, slower man than he had been, inclined to putter when out of uniform as much as stalk, and he sometimes read aloud to her from plays about the wrongfully deposed. He had achieved a dignity that depended on everyone in the room knowing what he had given up. 

She never asked him why he’d let her live. The rage in his wife’s voice over the vidscreen rang in her ears for weeks after; she didn’t think, after all, it should have been an easy choice. Seven children lost. But the closest he came to visible regret was an occasional, noble air of remove over his roasted insects, a tendency to sigh at fictional marriages’ dissolution. Otherwise, he endured gleefully, and smiled at her through each additional humiliation. Stripped of his titles, his connections, his invitations to state dinners—he became more and more inescapable: more and more himself. The dust, she thought, was crumbling off his skin.

 

3\. “Why am I here?” said Garak. 

It was true that she’d considered killing him—briefly. Not for her father, who hated and had been injured by too many people to make vengeance a practical gift, but because he was the only person she knew, besides herself, who Kira and her father agreed on. In the end the coincidence was more bizarre than the fact of their loathing. That was why she’d sought him out.

“I don’t need your company,” she told him, and that more than anything appeared to convince him of her intent. Shortly after he dropped the phaser and joined her on the rocks, reclining on one elbow like an old Hebitian, a little decadent and a little dowdy. He turned his face up to the heat. “You’ve been to Cardassia more recently than I have,” he pointed out, his eyes closed, his smile long and emotionless as a protective flap of skin. Or close to it: there was a softness at the corners of his mouth that made her think other things. 

“But not for long,” she said. “You lived there—”

“Please don’t try and guess how old I am,” he said, with resignation. “Not out loud. I can just about tolerate the mental emanations.”

“I’m thinking as hard as I can,” she told him. He coughed a laugh. It was so warm, and she could see the darkening grey of his cheek, veins rising under the scaled surface of the skin. 

“I traveled quite a bit in my far-off youth,” he said. “I could tell you any number of enchanting anecdotes about Romulus, or Tzenketh, and believe me, it’s quite hard to locate so much as an enchanting beetle on Romulus—but Cardassia, now. One hardly knows where to begin. Perhaps you should ask me questions, and I can fill in a few of the gaps.”

“You won’t lie?”

“Let us say,” said Garak, “that for the duration of this encounter I will not.”

“In that case,” said Ziyal, “where did you grow up?”

He moved his head until he was resting his temple on his knuckles; his eyes, open again, were clement and blue. “In the last homely house owned by Central Command,” he said, chuckling, almost to himself. “Remind me to recommend you some human literature before we’re done here.”

“That may be some time,” said Ziyal.

 

4\. Kira was suspicious of everything. Three weeks after Ziyal began her meetings with Garak, she marched into her quarters with a PADD under her arm, stormy-faced, and said, “You’re not even an ectotherm”—an opaque statement if Ziyal had ever heard one, but it shortly became clear that Kira had the holosuite in mind.

“The temperatures in there hover around fifty degrees celsius,” said Kira. “You can’t tell me you find that soothing—Bashir says your biochemistry leans towards the Bajoran, and a Bajoran wouldn’t last an hour in that program even if they stripped down and put ice packs in their armpits.” A horrified pause. “You’re not—”

“I’m not lounging naked in the holosuite with Garak, Nerys, no,” said Ziyal. She put her hands in her lap and tried not to giggle at Kira’s expression. “But you’re right—I’m not like a full-blooded Cardassian.” She glanced at her upturned palms. “I did spend the last six years on a desert planet, though.”

Kira, to her credit, didn’t wince: she blinked instead, the rapid covering of those dark, liquid pupils a kind of ghostly recoil, like a star wavering through the atmosphere on a humid night. She set the PADD on the bedside table with a sigh. “Well,” she said, “I feel like an idiot. Rightly so, I guess. You know I didn’t…”

“I know you’re looking for any evidence of mind control or coercion, Major,” said Ziyal. “It’s okay. Really, I appreciate it. But I’m afraid Garak and I just have a lot to talk about.”

She watched Kira struggle with the impulse to scoff or demand details about their discussions. The thing about Kira was that when she felt sympathy for a person, it happened on a level below words; Kira absorbed people’s pain as though through the skin. They had the same calluses on the tops of their palms, Kira’s faded and made satiny by age, and Ziyal’s dappled with pigment smears. It was hard to imagine becoming Kira, so despairing and sure, but Kira, obviously, didn’t have the same problem. She sat down next to Ziyal on the edge of the bed and Ziyal repressed the urge to smooth the side of her hair.

Kira was talking to everyone, except for her. Not the sort of thing anybody else would do to benefit her, and Ziyal was reminded of how it had been to help bury the Cardassians from the  _Ravinok_ , because there were too few survivors for only the pure of species to handle the bodies, and she had been Cardassian enough. She was half-Bajoran, and her cells belonged to Bajoran fragility, but she understood that instinct that knew that a corpse was more than a shell. Parts of the dead were locked into their cooling, ruined flesh. She felt the same way towards Kira: the girl Kira had been. All evidence and memory trapped in physical remains. It was the way Kira bent forward and propped an elbow on her knee, thinking furiously of her next objection. She was still, almost, young; still haunted, raging, _occupied_ , as Ziyal leaned in to hug her like a shroud.

 

5\. It was only when she came back to Bajor that it seemed dear to her. Kira’s friends, and the ragged expansionism of the towns; it was all so different from the soft, muted world of her childhood, which had been free of deprivation and anything to hold. Her father had been returned to her in the same general fashion—as a concrete entity, weak and strange, rather than an encompassing bastion—but she didn’t mention that to the people who processed her entrance to the university, or the young Bajorans who hesitantly asked what she had done to get sent here. Who had she killed? 

She gave them new answers every day, and once cited Major Kira as her last victim, hoping as she did so that Garak had been woken in his station bed by a twinge of inexplicable pride. She threw herself into her studies. Bajor she learned incidentally, and incidentally loved.

“I’d like to paint you,” she told Kira, when Kira visited her dormitory: to check up, she claimed, on the skills she’d taught Ziyal aboard DS9. They sparred on the balcony—Ziyal liked having a balcony again—with a view of the sea, and Kira stumbled at Ziyal’s announcement; almost missed a lunge.

“Hey,” she said, catching Ziyal’s arm. She yanked her up short. Ziyal tended to go limp when Kira laid actual hands on her, which was no good in a fight, but then, it wasn’t a universal habit. Not that she was going to tell Kira that. “You want to what?”

“Paint you,” said Ziyal. “Do art, that will be of you.”

To the west of them, the sun fired the peacock-green waves to foamy opalescence. “I thought you did… flowers,” said Kira, releasing her.

Ziyal went for bust. “Who says I don’t?”

“That might be the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard from someone who wasn’t Dr. Bashir,” said Kira. She hesitated. “Or Lieutenant Dax.” She hesitated a little longer. “Or Quark—look, the point is, I need a better circle of acquaintances, and you need—”

“To pick a different model?” said Ziyal. “It’s all right. You’re allowed to say no.” It was just that standing here with the planet laid out beneath them, to the edge of the sky, Kira looked like a window; her outline silled with gold. When she moved you could see another terrain through her, raw and arid, land that had been stripped for decades and then was left to be scourged from the air. All right, so part of that was a consequence of the awful red-orange uniform, but it was artistically true. Surely that counted for something in this day and age. Here on Bajor.

“Then no,” said Kira, but she grinned a little. They fought on.


End file.
